Bad Hobby

By Kathy Fagan

From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.

 

In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a “fatal diagnosis,” how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body “meant to bend & breed” opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our “common griefs” so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these—a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.

 

Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a “child who won’t ever get born”: with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. “You think your one life precious—”

And Bad Hobby thinks—hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces “inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us.” And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. “Don’t worry, baby,” Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. “We’re okay.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Release date: Sep 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781571317612

Kathy Fagan

Kathy Fagan is the author of Bad Hobby and Sycamore, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. She is also the author of four previous collections, including The Charm; The Raft, winner of the National Poetry Series; and MOVING & ST RAGE, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize. Fagan’s work has appeared in venues such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, the New Republic, Best American Poetry, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship, and served as the Frost Place poet in residence. Fagan is cofounder of the MFA program at The Ohio State University, where she teaches poetry, and coedits the Wheeler Poetry Prize Book Series for The Journal and The Ohio State University Press.

Book preview

1

DEDICATED

The way I remember it,

I caught beauty

Like a flu,

Via handshake or high five

Or a thank-you-

For-your-service

Between the guys at the VA.

The one who lurched

Toward me, touching

Me, saying:

You like poetry,

More vision than question.

The one who said,

Overhearing me correct

My Korean conflict-era dad:

Go easy, you won’t have him

Long. Or the one

Who said: You watch

Him like a hawk;

Just let him go.

In the molecular

Biology lab, each tank

Full of impossibly

Small fish bears

A sign that says: You are responsible

For your own deads.

Plural. Sure.

The older I get, the more

I am reminded of song

Dedications on the radio.

I called Cousin Brucie

To send out "I’ve Got You,

Babe" to my parents

On their wedding anniversary.

When he played them

Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves,

Bob and Mary Anne

Were understandably confused,

But appreciative nonetheless.

I myself have

Had three partners

In my lifetime,

And what I still love best about

Two of them

Is how I never had to explain

That joke. There was all that

Time listening

To radio or TV,

TV turned internet.

I wish I could

Dedicate those spent hours

Now to my mom,

So she could come back awhile.

She wouldn’t have to know

She was dead,

Like we didn’t know then

How much time was passing.

I would play

With her hair like I used to,

And tell her stories until

She began to doze off

Like she used to,

Waking only to say:

I didn’t ever know you

Loved me, Kath. You never

Wanted affection from us, Kath.

Just like she used to.

The wrong song, somehow

The right song, playing on and on,

Like a perfect virus.

FOREST

When I found the tick,

I forgot the rules I’d read:

with thumb and forefinger I severed its body from mine—

just wanting it out of me,

as I’ve heard people say of babies and cancers.

I felt a mix of tenderness and disgust

for it then, like the twin

streams of blood and water

rinsing down the drain.

That summer I used English only

to write poems and speak with my lover,

yet the French insisted on speaking English to me:

You visit forêt? asked the pharmacist

in charge of medical emergencies like mine.

I heard f-o-r-a-y. Foray in a forêt.

Non, I said, jamais.

Not far from there, pears grow

in bottles suspended from the trees

to make a potent digestif.

As long as the fruit remains submerged

in the liqueur, the pear keeps whole indefinitely.

When my mother locked me out—

I was two, and three … —

I’d go to our willow tree,

wrap myself in its whips,

stroke its many sharp eyebrows with my hands.

The pharmacist asked me to

remove my tights to see where

the tick had lodged,

not far from my crotch. Exposed

like that, I thought I should feel more

embarrassed than I did.

I used to believe

I had been preserved by something.

Now I think I am

the preserving spirit—with my leafy fragrance, sound of wings

in the canopy, blood

draining swiftly from the head

as I look up, neither host nor guest. Exile

speaking for one reason only,

and the reason is love.

STRAY

The lamb is bleating circles round the pasture.

He slipped from his enclosure like a soul—

through three fences!—and because he’s still nursing,

his calls draw alarming response from the herd.

He won’t come